Thursday, August 12, 2010

Kids room toy organization solution: Picture Tags

Sometimes the mess in our playroom drives me up the wall.
Often, everything that is in the boxes pictured above is laying on the floor.

I have learned that kids like to dump boxes of toys on the floor.

I used to have a "theme" for things that belonged in every box,
but most of the time we end up just stuffing toys in the boxes,
just making sure they are not on the floor.

But that doesn't really help much, because next time when they are looking for something,
they end up dumping everything on the floor again.

So I got this idea, nothing genius, but hope it will work:
I labeled the boxes, so that they can see what belongs in there.
Not just that: we organized the boxes,
then I took a picture of the contents of the box.
I made tags using these pictures, so that my kids (who can't read yet)
can see what belongs in which box.

I uploaded the pictures to my computer,
and used Photoshop to add a nice background and titles.

I printed and cut the tags.
Then, I used clear packing tape to laminate the tags.
With a hole punch I made holes in the tags.

Then, I had my girls match the labels with the right box,
so that they would get the idea.

They did great!

We tied the tags to the boxes with ribbon.

And, now I hope I won't find all these toys on the floor anymore :)
So far, so good...

4 comments:

Clever idea. As a former preschool teacher, I discovered this trick many years ago and used it to help organized our family toys. Didn't mean the toys always got put away, but when we did, it made it easier on everyone.

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